WE’RE ALREADY CLONING ENDANGERED ANIMALS…
In August 2020, a healthy clone of the endangered Przewalski’s horse (pronounced shuh-VAL-skees) was born in Texas. Przewalski’s horses, which are native to the steppes of central Asia, are the last truly ‘wild’ horse species. Around 2,000 remain, but they lack essential genetic diversity because they’re all descended from just 12 wild-caught individuals.
The little foal, called Kurt, was cloned using 40-year-old frozen cells from a stallion whose genes aren’t well represented in today’s population. Because Kurt is genetically identical to the stallion, the hope is that when he grows up and breeds, Kurt will restore this lost genetic diversity via his descendants. “The colt is expected to be one of the most genetically important individuals of his species,” says Bob Wiese, chief life sciences officer at San Diego Zoo Global, who was involved in the project.
Other wild species have also been successfully cloned, including the coyote, the African wildcat and a rare Southeast Asian cow called the banteng. But many conservationists oppose cloning because they see it as an unproven, expensive distraction from tried and tested conservation methods, such as protected areas and anti-poaching initiatives.
Some of the companies that clone pet dogs also clone working animals, such as drug-detection dogs. “That’s the number one thing we’re doing with dog cloning,” says cell biologist Dr P Olof Olsson, at the Abu Dhabi Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea. Also known as Sooam Biotech, the company has produced hundreds of canine clones and many are now in active service. If you’ve ever collected a suitcase from the carousel at Seoul’s Incheon Airport, chances are it was checked by a cloned sniffer.
The idea is to produce animals that are genetically predisposed to learn well. It takes time and money to train a sniffer dog, but even with the best training and the brightest animals, only around half of conventionally bred dogs manage to qualify. Cloned dogs do much better. “80 to 90 per cent end up going into service,” says Olsson, “and we’ve been told multiple times that our clones respond better to training.” Here, the method has become a way to minimise doggy dropouts and reduce costs.
Cloned cats and dogs are one thing, but would you want to eat a clone? In China, where demand for prime-quality beef is rocketing, another cloning company thinks its customers will.
Boyalife Genomics, which works with the Abu Dhabi Biotech Research Foundation, is building a $30m (approximately £23m) cloning facility in the coastal city of Tianjin where it plans to clone some of the world’s finest beef cattle. The goal, according to the company’s chief executive Xu Xiaochun, is to start by producing 100,000 cloned cattle embryos annually, then increase that to a million. Eventually the firm hopes to be responsible for 5 per cent of China’s premium slaughtered cattle and by scaling production up, Boyalife hopes to bring the cost of cloning down.
“Cloned cats and dogs are one thing, but would you want to eat a clone?”